Microsoft casting about for viable mobile browser strategy

Microsoft's Windows browser earns a lot of criticism from web developers. Even Internet Explorer 8, currently in beta, is a long way behind Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera when it comes to standards compliance. Not only does IE8 not support all the standards these other browsers do—its implementation of the standards it does support leaves a lot to be desired, as it has many bugs and omissions.

As bad as the situation on Windows is, the desktop browser is streets ahead of Microsoft's Windows Mobile browser. Internet Explorer Mobile shares the Windows browser's branding, but not much more. Underneath it's a very different browser, based on the old IE4 code, with its own unique set of bugs and its own particular take on what a web page should look like. Given that it's based on IE4, IE Mobile's support for current web standards is not good, making web browsing in IE Mobile a miserable experience. Pages don't display properly, and, since scripting support is also poor, they don't work properly either.

IE Mobile isn't just a bad browser. It's also a bad mobile application. Part of this is due to Windows Mobile's diverse hardware (significantly, not all Windows Mobile devices have touch-screens), but even on fully-featured hardware, navigation is a chore. Zooming in and out of pages is clumsy, scrolling uses fiddly scroll bars, and content is scaled poorly to fit within the confines of a small screen. Some of these gripes are true of the broader Windows Mobile platform—it tries to reuse user interface concepts from the desktop OSes in spite of their poor suitability to handheld devices—but the presentation flaws are simply a result of insufficient thought going into how to make web pages designed for computers work well on phones.

IE Mobile rendering Ars Technica

IE Mobile has received a few updates over the years, but it remains markedly inferior to alternative products. Eighteen months ago, Microsoft could probably get away with that; mobile Internet speeds were too low and mobile hardware too weak to support a proper browsing experience. But that was then; nowadays we have 3G, faster processors powering handhelds, and high-resolution touch screens. As the iPhone has so ably demonstrated, it's now possible to browse the web on a phone without pain. Safari on the iPhone supports scripting and CSS, and renders pages in much the same way as its desktop counterpart. The result of all this is that iPhone web browsing now dwarfs Windows Mobile browsing, in spite of Windows Mobile devices being far more widespread than iPhones.

Though Microsoft's mobile web browser has, like its desktop counterpart, suffered from a lack of attention from the company, Redmond had been trying to improve the mobile browsing experience with its Deepfish project. Deepfish used an approach that will be familiar to anyone who has used Safari on an iPhone. Deepfish presented a zoomed-out version of the page to allow easy navigation and to give an impression of what the page looks like. One then zooms in on the page to read the parts that are of interest. This kind of interface works well on mobile devices, as it provides a good trade-off between destroying the page's layout to fit it on the small screen and making the text large enough to read.

Deepfish deep-sixed

Deepfish was, however, designed for an older era of phones. Instead of running a true web browser on the phone, Deepfish used a proxy server operated by Microsoft; this proxy server rendered the actual web pages and sent the images to the user. In the days of slow GPRS and EDGE, and per-megabyte billing, this made some sense, as it reduced the amount of data traffic required to use a web page. Today, however, that approach is unnecessarily complex; mobile Internet connections are fast enough and becoming cheap enough that it's better to send all the page data to the phone, and let the phone render the pages itself. Because of this outmoded approach to web page access, Microsoft killed off the Deepfish project a few weeks ago; the proxy servers used for Deepfish access were turned off at the end of September.

So, Deepfish isn't going to be the future of browsing on Windows Mobile. Fortunately, it wasn't the software giant's only mobile browsing project. When Windows Mobile 6.1 was released earlier this year, Microsoft announced that a new browser would be coming to Windows Mobile, arriving some time before the end of the year. That promise would offer the full Internet on a phone—the same promise as Apple has been making for the iPhone. The company wants to go one better than Apple, too, by including support for Flash, Silverlight, and H.264 video in its new browser.

That sounds good, and it's certainly more than the current IE Mobile can deliver. The new browser will support the same kind of zoom and pan features that Deepfish (and iPhone) use to enable easy navigation of web pages. And best of all, the renderer is the same as the one from the desktop browser, so web pages will look exactly as they should; desktop browsing on mobile devices.

At least, that's the theory. The unfortunate reality looks less appealing, because the rendering engine going into the next IE Mobile isn't Microsoft's latest and greatest, the one the company has been working on for IE8. Instead, it's reported to be the engine from IE6. From 2001.

If this is true, it's an unfortunate choice. After years of neglect, with IE8 it looked like Microsoft had started to take its browser seriously again; still behind its competitors, but heading in the right direction. True, the current state of IE Mobile is such that the IE6 codebase will offer a significant upgrade." But it's an upgrade to a seven-year-old browser. There are good modern browsers that don't available for mobile platforms—iPhone's Safari, and Opera Mobile for Windows Mobile and Symbian, are pretty close to the cutting edge of browser technology—so it's unclear why Microsoft is apparently turning to IE6 to fix what ails IE Mobile.

If Microsoft were transforming IE Mobile from its current state to a browser as good as the competition, the purpose would be clear—it would show that it is serious about mobile web browsing, and wants to respond to Apple's dominance in this small (but growing) market. But using the IE6 engine doesn't do that; it leaves IE Mobile behind competing platforms, leaving both users and web developers alike frustrated. It's not just iPhone that does this better; Opera Mobile 9.5 is already a modern, capable Windows Mobile web browser that's regularly updated and has a touch-friendly pan/zoom interface.

A broader malaise

As bad as the use of IE6 is from a technical standpoint, one can argue that the choice speaks volumes about Microsoft's commitment to mobile computing as a whole. Next to iPhone OS, Windows Mobile looks and feels old, awkward, and ugly. Third parties have tried to mask this with custom front-ends like HTC's TouchFlo software, but these are by no means complete user interfaces, merely improved program launchers.

iPhone should have spurred Microsoft into action, but it doesn't seem to have happened. Windows Mobile 6.1 was a barely perceptible update, and Windows Mobile 7—the release expected to make Windows Mobile as usable as the iPhone—isn't due until next year. And even that has recently been delayed. With a mobile market that is more competitive than ever, the delay in getting Windows Mobile 7 out the door could come back to haunt Microsoft. Mobile computing—and mobile browsing in particular—matters. iPhone has shown that. Second-best just isn't good enough.